UndeadAndSinning
by Noah Wright
Summary: After the War on Politics in 2025, Americans' opinions have vastly moved toward independent interests and domestic expansion. State Inclusion acts have greatly ratified the Constitution and allowed for the 50 states to separate into 6 regional unions, thus fracturing the federal system our Founding Fathers built. United We Stand, Together We Lie.


Take Me

"Helmet…locked", hummed the suit's interface. Even if the helmet was locked, he wasn't safe, thought Lazarus. You couldn't be.

"Scanning for active organs, taking blood sample…", the suit's right hand glove pierced the edge of Lazarus' index finger. The icy needle cause him to shudder slightly under the suit's plastic lining. After a moment, the voice came back to life.

"Hello, Lazarus R. Cain", the feminine voice affectionately responded. It was fake affection, he noted. He knew there was certainly no goodness or sincerity in the job.

"It's good to see you again, let's get started!" The suit chirped happily. It was just too gross. He was getting sick. He had been ill for fifteen years, ever since he was planted here. The plague surrounded him. But he wasn't keeling over dead yet. Why?

He walked through the aisles, flipping the switches, powering up the fusion accelerators and turned touch screen dials that opened the cooking hatches. This was a nuclear power facility, built fifteen years ago when the joint Jap-Chinese navies invaded the west coast of the United States. A portion of the population in California and Oregon became a mass exodus that moved to the northern reaches of Washington State and Canada.

But poor Lazarus stayed with the backwash of Los Angeles. Many of the civilians faced chopping block execution, chains for slavery, and weapon facilities test chambers. What did Lazarus face? He faced the warmth of the radioactive machines and a simple job. Somehow he still managed to hang onto most of the things he loved. How was he so lucky? How was he so cursed?

The streets loved Lazarus and the houses hated him. He would spend months on end roaming the slummy avenues for a decent slice of bread, or for a whore who'd treat him right for a night. Those rewards would be presented occasionally. Some nights, he would hang inside the whorehouses just for light and security, but he still would have to pay. His salary covered this payment. He had everything. But he wanted none of it. Probably living better than most Americans in the captured land of the Rising Sun Empire, and he just wanted his life to reset.

Like he knew the suit's voice was fake and airy, he knew that the idea that his seemingly good life wasn't sound. He knew, though his salary was good, he was being kicked in the head by his empirical superiors. He was a drone, producing TerraWatts for the Empire, with his son locked in the closet. His son. He couldn't leave him. But the child couldn't live outside that closet. The world would taint him.

Lazarus rarely ever saw his son, Jon. Just those occasional slips of light that fall through the crack of a door frame, illuminating a sliver of the boy's face. But that seemed to be enough for Lazarus. The pale, suffering blue eyes, the blank dot of a pupil. The porcelain skin showed no sign of color. It was enough to drive any sympathetic soul mad. But Lazarus had already gone mad, and that was the curse of the plant. It drained every ounce of sanity Lazarus had.

But more importantly, the plant drained him of his courage, of his maturity. He could steal from people in the L.A. slums and have as much sex as he wanted, but that didn't make him a man at all. What made him a man was something he had lost fifteen years ago. He lost his girl, his pride, and never truly gained proper parenting skills. Lazarus was the soil the power plant needed to thrive, and he was unmoving, always there for fear of deadly prosecution and removal if he deserted. He instead made this fear unapparent, thinking to himself that he wouldn't leave Jon. Selfishly, he used his child to forget his cowardice. His child that lay in the three by three meter storage closet, face and soul paling from lack of exposure to sunlight and suffocating from the closed quarters.

Lazarus never accounted for this. What he did do was draw up an alibi he would use if imperial spies snatched him out of the plant. How he never knew that the kid was hiding there. What even lay further down in Lazarus' plan was that he would tell the guards that the boy must be part of the Sabotage, a resistance gang that lived within the ghetto of Los Angeles. This surely would get the kid executed, and Lazarus wanted that in spite of the child's mother. He wanted her to see the corpse, he wanted to make her see what she had done. His fear was that she wouldn't care. His fear was that some imperial coroner would throw the body down into the incinerator before she could see it.

In many ways he loved Jon dearly. In many ways Jon wasn't a spitting image of his mother. Through the protective helmet's visor, Lazarus saw himself in Jon, but something was altered in the similar qualities. The boy seemed older than he really was. His icicle eyes were aged and his cheekbones tugged against his skin slightly. Lazarus fed his son about two meals a day and did check on him many times. Their conversations were brief, because he also had the fear that Jon would ask too deep of a question, one that required frustration and work to answer nicely. He wanted dearly to tell his son everything. He laid in a ratty bed one morning wondering if his son already knew it all. That was one of the most likely possibilities Lazarus had thought of, and he immediately discredited it and forgot.

He walked briskly over to re-stabilize the pressure caps and sync the electrical converters to their destination terminals. After punching in the right coordinates, he watched the spectacle shoot out through the center of the facility, upward into clear tubes that sprouted through the roof. It was the only source of sunlight, that got sparser when smog rolled overhead.

Lazarus was the soil and water needed for the plant. Without a man to operate this facility, fifty percent of the city would blackout. She would see that, he thought. But why did all the other facilities require two hundred men to operate? Any plant was the same size as his, but why was he assigned alone? And what if he ditched work? Would they watch him walk the streets and plug him with a bullet from a surveillance blimp 500 yards away? The endings were incalculable and even deceiving.

Below all this fear, hate, and droning labor resided a deep longing. He longed to be taken away. Taken by anyone or anything, away from his life. The whores were aging and so was he. Jon just got paler and quieter. The power plant was always the same, never breaking, nor speeding up it's meticulous energy conversion process. Just humming and compressing its radiation into warmth. His soul cried, Take Me. Take me anywhere, and if I am free from this place, Jon will be free too. He will be able to escape, he will have an opportunity to live life how it is meant to be lived. I won't have fear of him getting into the ghetto, because I will be gone. I won't have to worry that I am not a good father, because I will be gone.

If you take me, I won't be afraid. The curse will be lifted.


End file.
